Apple vs. Adobe: No-win Situation

Published  June 13th, 2010

I'm not the biggest fan of Flash so when Steve Jobs wrote his open letter to Adobe, I fully supported his position on the subject. Flash is CPU intensive, a RAM hog, and crashes frequently. Since Apple wants to always control every aspect of the customer experience, it made very little sense for Apple to allow Flash to be on the iPhone/iPad. It's not personal, it's just business. Or is it? 

Steve Jobs is no stranger to grudges and controversy (see Jobs vs. Gizmodo) so when I found out via TWiT that Adobe took its development of the video-editing suite Premiere away from the Mac platform for a number of years against the wishes of Steve Jobs, I had to wonder whether this move was retribution against Adobe. Steve Jobs is shrewd, cunning, and ruthless and a lot of his reputation is derived from this, but this attitude and determination is what drives Apple to put out the caliber of products they do. Whether Jobs was paying Adobe back or not, dropping Flash was the right move.